


Stop Breathing

by kissesfromkrug



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Slow Build, Violence, keeping secrets
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-23
Updated: 2017-05-23
Packaged: 2018-11-04 04:58:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10983846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kissesfromkrug/pseuds/kissesfromkrug
Summary: When an event at an air-show goes horribly wrong, it's up to Ryan and his team to discover the real reason behind the disaster. With all his troubles buried within his case, the least of Ryan's problems is a close friend he's had since college — a good partner, really — but when he figures out who they actually are...priorities can change a bit.Through various connections and red herring clues, finding help — and betrayal — from some unlikely sources, and a forbidden romance by all standards of the word, Ryan finally realizes how deep into the case he is, and how this was not what he thought he'd signed up for.





	Stop Breathing

**Author's Note:**

> Not for profit, fictional; feel free to point out any typos. :)
> 
> I now present the AU I can't really explain and that kinda came out of the thoughts from my trip to the airshow.
> 
> It will probably be very long. Just a warning.

"The air show is tomorrow?" Ryan says, pushing back from his desk and spinning around slowly in the chair.

"Yeah, you wanna go with me? You gotta come," Taylor pushes. "It'll be really cool to get to see all the military aircraft, won't it?" Ryan smiles. Taylor has always had an obsession with big planes.

"Sure, I don't have too much going on, and as long as I don't have too much to do—"

"Okay, so you're going, awesome," Taylor interrupts, a grin in his voice. "I called Davo and Nursey, they said they'll come too, and Ebs is bringing drinks and blankets or chairs and shit. I already bought five tickets."

"You had this all planned out before I even said yes?" Ryan laughs.

"I knew you'd come." He huffs pointedly, but Taylor knows there's no heat to it. "Hey, I can't help your predictability."

"I'm not  _that_ predicable."

"Lies. Anyway, meet ya down by Villeneuve near 10?" Taylor confirms.

"You got it." Ryan hangs up and sets down his phone, pushing himself across his home office with his toe. He reaches on top of the file cabinet and grabs his monthly planner, marking down  **Air Show w/buds**  in thin black Sharpie for Saturday. It'll be a fun escape from general monotony.

Ryan scoots back over to his desk and puts his planner in the middle drawer on the left, on top of a schedule of the air show he'd printed out the previous Saturday just in case. Taylor isn't the only one obsessed with planes. Next to Ryan's desk, about four feet high on the wall, hangs a signed photo of the Snowbirds in perfect formation. It's been a while since they've been around.

They won't be at this airshow, but Ryan isn't too disappointed. There will be so many other things to see, like the Blue Angels, who only visit once in a blue moon. He hasn't met any of them yet.

Ryan reluctantly leaves his soft, spinning, rolling chair to grab a water from the fridge. He's had trouble staying hydrated and well-nourished lately, focusing so much on his work that now, Taylor has to call in a few times a day to make sure he's getting his daily values in. Ryan's almost sure that if he told Taylor that he had insomnia, Taylor would physically come over every night to make sure he'd get to sleep at a fairly decent time.

Taylor's a good friend, but he sometimes oversteps his boundaries. Everyone has that one person who can't keep their mouth shut. Ryan doesn't hold it against him, it's just who Taylor is. A very active dirty blond with a big smile, big heart, and even bigger lips.

• • •

Ryan stands in front of the floor-length mirror with legs spread at shoulder width, deft hands looping his tie and straightening the lapels of his suit. He frowns once it's perfect, looking up at the framed photo on his bedroom wall. "It's an  _airshow,_ you idiot," he murmurs to himself. He's about to undo his tie when another thought hits him. "Looking nice isn't ever a problem."

30 minutes later, he's arrived at Villeneuve Airport at 9:50, waiting at the gate for his friends. A rifle is tucked in his belt, like always, and he has a hand in his pocket on his wallet, ready to show the guards. "Nugget boy!"

"Hallsy," Ryan answers as Taylor squeezes him in a tight side-arm hug.

"Nice that you could make it, bud." Ryan appreciates the lack of a comment about his outfit. Taylor's finally gotten used to his formal clothing choices.

"I got here before you. And why wouldn't I have come?"

"I dunno, sometimes you bail out on me," Taylor shrugs, and Ryan frowns.

"That was  _once—_ and I was in the hospital from a stab wound!"

"Still." Ryan rolls his eyes, looking around for their other friends. He runs his hand through his lengthening dark brown hair, spotting a few figures in the distance carrying chairs and blankets, a giant cooler rolling behind them.

"Are you serious?" He laughs.

"What? I told you they were bringing blankets and chairs and shit." The figures wave at them after a few seconds, and Taylor enthusiastically waves back.

"You get too excited about these things." 

"Don't tell me you don't love planes," Taylor challenges, and Ryan shrugs. "See? I have a point. Admit it."

"You may or may not be kind of right every four times," Ryan replies, but Taylor isn't vexed. He hardly ever is.

"How's it goin' boys?" Jordan asks once they approach, patting Taylor and Ryan on the back. Connor stands rather awkwardly next to Darnell until he too greets them, and Connor is forced to interact.

"Why so tense, Davo?" Taylor asks, and he shrugs.

"Work is busy," he says simply.

"Well you know what, work isn't here. Forget about it." Connor cracks a pained smile.

"I'll try."

"You will," Taylor says, lightly punching his shoulder. "I'll help." He turns to Jordan. "You get everything, Ebs?"

"Think so. You can check when we get in." They walk to the entrance, and Ryan flashes his badge when they question him about his gun. He's given a nod of approval, slipping his wallet away as he waits.

"Where first?" Darnell asks.

"The show in the air starts at 11, and that's when the beer garden opens," Taylor says, checking the program he'd gotten from a service member. "Right now we can check out the big bombers and copters."

"Big guns?" Taylor nods at Darnell with a growing smile.

"Big guns is an understatement." There's a medical helicopter a couple hundred yards from them, so they make their way over.

"Who's gonna watch the stuff?" Jordan asks. Connor raises a hand, and Ryan chuckles.

"This isn't school, you can talk without raising your hand." Connor looks down. "Hey, it's alright." The kid's always been skittish— _kid_ , Ryan thinks, as if he were 12 years younger instead of four—but today, he seems even worse than usual.

"I'll watch it," Jordan decides. He murmurs something encouraging in Connor's ear, who nods and flexes his lithe fingers.

"Seriously, Davo, is it just work?" Ryan asks, leaning close as Darnell strikes up a conversation with Taylor about his latest interesting patient and the price of coffee.

"Yeah, I—I'm fine, a little tired." Ryan raises an eyebrow, and Connor swallows.

"Taking medicine for it?" He shakes his head. "Might wanna consider it. I do, sometimes."

"Why?"

"Chronic insomnia." Connor nods in understanding. Ryan doesn't say a word as they get in line to climb in the helicopter. He doesn't see Connor nearly as often as he used to, and the kid— _he's not a kid, stop_ calling _him that_ —has seemed more uneasy and quiet than usual. "You sure it's sleep?" He asks lowly.

"Yeah, why?" Ryan studies his eyes for a moment, Connor looking all around to avoid eye contact.

"Just...thinking."

"About?" Connor prompts.

"Anyone making trouble for you?" Connor catches Ryan's eye for a split second, then swiftly turns to look at his sneakers.

"No." Ryan presses his lips together in a thin line and doesn't break his gaze.

"Connor."

"It's nothing, it's no one, stuff is fine, it's not anyone  _else's_ fault, it's mine, I know I've been weird lately, but it's—"

" _Connor_ ," Ryan repeats, a little louder as he cuts off Connor's babbling. Taylor turns around to look at them. "What?"

"You wanna go in?" Ryan didn't realize that they were first in line, and he climbs in after Darnell into the medical helicopter. Darnell is talking with the serviceman sitting in the cockpit at co-pilot, and although it's a rather small craft, Ryan is fascinated by the dashboard. Even with all the calculations and research he does on flight, he doesn't ever really the chance get to go inside.

Ryan looks over at Connor, who's running a hand over the back of the pilot's chair. He trails his fingers over the bare insides of the copter, over the seats in the back and the walls, and up to the ceiling. "Like it?" Connor jumps and withdraws his hand, looking just like a wide-eyed, startled deer in headlights.

"Yeah, it's—it's nice." He shoves his hands in his pockets, and once they move on from the copter, Ryan pulls him aside.

"You know you can tell me what's wrong, right? I'm here to help." Connor swallows hard and shakes his head.

"No, it's—" he starts, licking his chapped lips nervously, "It's nothing you can help me with, I'll be okay."

"Are you _sure_?"

"I'm sure."

At 11, Jordan decides to camp out in the middle of the runway, laying down the blanket and setting up their chairs to prepare for the show. Connor's loosened up a bit, but there's still something bothering him. Ryan is almost annoyed by the fact that he can't help. That's what friends are for, no? 

"Ebs, where are the mixed veggie bags?" Darnell asks, searching through the giant cooler.

"Shit,  _that's_ what I forgot."

"I thought you said you got everything," Ryan sighs, opening a water bottle and taking a peanut butter sandwich and bag of chips.

"I thought I did," Jordan says with a frown. "Sorry."

"Next time, I'll help pack," Connor offers, and Jordan nods.

"That might be a good idea." There's a sudden growl of engines, louder than before, and all five men look up to see the Blue Angels gathering speed on the runway before cleanly lifting off, two by two.

"Ever seen them before?" Taylor asks Ryan while keeping both eyes on the blue jets.

"Not in person."

"Excited?"

"Yeah, but probably not as much as you," Ryan smiles.

"Oh yeah?" Taylor grins, glancing at him out of his peripheral vision.

"Are we really having a discussion about who's more obsessed?"

"Yes we are." The dull roar of the Blue Angels above them refocuses everyone's attention, and a speaker is turned on broadcasting the flight leader's intercom conversations with the ATC.

The group sits in silence as they watch the wedge-shape invert before adjusting speeds to form the echelon. Ryan is mildly impressed, but it's nothing he hasn't seen before. The planes shift again, stacking on top of each other with seemingly inches from the bottom of one to the top of another. They carefully rotate 120 degrees in alternating directions, somehow not letting their wingtips touch. A synchronized barrel roll follows, and okay, Ryan is into it now.

A staggered column formation follows next, each plane shifting up when the one next to it dives a few feet down. Back in a stack, they continue to create trails of white smoke as they speed past—no, that's not the right word—as they  _dash_ across the sky, perfectly horizontal to the ground. Ryan can't really imagine a day better than this.

Connor winces as they break the sound barrier, the roar of the engines following a few seconds behind them. A round of cheers goes up as the group dives straight down, leveling out at a few thousand feet above the ground. Each plane does a set of several half rotations simultaneously, everyone then veering to the left.

Ryan smiles up at the crystal clear blue sky, almost in disbelief of the consistently good weather for the past week. The planes split off individually, each routine complicated on its own and even more incredible when all six come together perfectly once more. All of a sudden, after they've headed nearly straight up and leveled off upside-down, a frantic call is heard through the giant set of speakers.

"Mayday, mayday, engine two is down and oxygen systems failing, mayday, about to bail—" An earthshaking boom erupts from above, and the flight leader is blasted to fiery smithereens. Screams and gasps go up from the thousands watching on the ground, and as Ryan looks on in horror, the debris and shockwave from the one plane strikes four others, the sixth dropping down and flipping over. 

People are tripping over each other to run to the exits, but Ryan just stands up and watches as one fireball turns to five. Taylor's hand latches onto his arm tightly, and Ryan can feel him being tugged along. "No," he murmurs as the sixth Blue Angel, in a hurry to try and land, hits the ground head-on following the solo pilot's ejection by parachute. "I can't leave."

"Ryan!" Jordan shouts in his ear, "Ryan, come on, we have to go!" He painfully tears his gaze away from the seemingly blood-stained sky to find Taylor with the cooler in his arms and Connor with the blanket around his shoulders.

"Ryan!" Darnell insists, and finally,  _finally_ , he unglues his feet from the pavement and runs after his friends. They leave the beach chairs on where they'd set them up, not regarded as a necessity. If Ryan's honest with himself, he doesn't think anything they brought was a necessity. He was taught that when there's a fire, you're supposed to drop everything and run. Nothing is as precious as a life.

"Where are we going?" Ryan asks Taylor breathlessly as they jog away from the site through the masses of terrified people, Ryan still a bit hesitant to leave.

"As far away from here as we can!" Ryan looks back to the sky, now wishing he'd worn something a little more comfortable. Bits of flaming, oil-covered parts begin to hit the ground in a huge radius. Connor yells as a slick shard of an engine lands a few feet to his right, and he stumbles to the ground.

"Davo, you alright?" Ryan asks, grabbing the blanket, then his friend's hand to haul him up.

"Just stunned," he answers, eyes wider than ever. "We gotta go." He lets go of Ryan's hand, who stops and turns back to the sky.

"Nugget!" He can hear Taylor calling for him, but the sight in the cloudless expanse of sky is like nothing he's ever seen before. " _Ryan_!" He's seen injuries in sports, car crashes, and seen bombings on the tv, but nothing like this. Nothing even _close_.

Someone sprints past him, knocking into his shoulder and sending him to the ground. "Ryan! Ryan, come on!" Darnell shouts, dropping back to help Ryan and dragging him to his feet.

"No, I can't leave," Ryan insists. "I can't—I have to—"

"You have to leave before you spend your last seconds watching a 100-pound blazing plane part hurtling towards your face; let's fucking  _move_!" Ryan can't keep his eyes off of the thick black smoke discoloring the once-beautiful midday sky, even as he's being hurriedly hauled away. They finally finds their way to the exit, even more chaos awaiting them beyond the gates.

There are scattered piles of mangled metal even outside the entrance, orange and yellow—in some places, even blue—flames licking up from them. People are running around crazily, with no real sense of visible direction, and there are hundreds of shouted phone calls of terrified onlookers as they make their way—or stand in place—around the massive parking lot.

"Ryan, where'd you park?" Taylor breathes in his ear. "You've got a nice truck."

"It's not big enough for everyone," Jordan reminds him quickly. Ryan doesn't tell him that it can seat five in the cab. "I'll take Nursey, you take Davo, and Ryan will meet us at my house. Sound good?"

"I think—"

"Yeah, great, see you there," Taylor rushes out. Ryan feels a startling heat on the back of his ankles and looks back to see that the blanket has caught fire. He stomps on it repeatedly, spotting his muscled black pickup truck in the third mile-long row.

He tosses the blanket on the passenger seat as he tries to slam the door, buckle, and turn the key in the ignition all at once. He can't move anywhere at the moment, people running around—and sometimes into—the neatly parked vehicles. He pulls out his gun, stashing it in the center console before reaching for the touch screen and calling his partner. "Fer, we've got a problem," he says the moment Andrew picks up.

"I saw, we've got the local news on and they're covering it. We'll need as much information as possible though, and since you were an eyewitness, I'm sure Todd will put you on the case."

"I know, but I have to meet—"

"Come to the office, we've got someone on their way to question you about what you saw while it's fresh in your mind." Ryan's pretty sure it'll stay fresh for a lot longer than a few hours.

"Now?"

" _Yes_ , now," Andrew says as if it were obvious. "See you asap." Ryan frowns as the line goes dead, and he spots a route open up as more people decide to go behind his truck. He sets his left hand on the horn, cruising across the bumpy grass and asphalt parking lot and trying to avoid any accidents. The crowd parts around him, and once he's onto 633 East. He pushes another button on the screen, and Taylor's number comes up. He clicks it, and Taylor picks it up almost immediately.

"What?"

"I can't meet you there, I've gotta stop at work for something," Ryan rushes out. "I'm sorry, but I'll see you guys as soon as I get back."

"But why?"

"An important work thing, Taylor, I can't make it. You guys will still be there when I get there, right?"

"Depends." There's screams and faint explosions in the background. Taylor must still be stuck in the parking lot.

"Come on, Tay," Ryan almost growls as he swerves around a little gold Volvo that's going too slowly for his liking. "I'll see you later."

"When?"

"When I'm done." When Ryan hangs up, he glances at the speedometer. He's going 110 in the fast lane—20 above the posted 90 kilometers an hour. Oh well.

He doesn't know how, but he's managed to lead the heavy flow of high-speed traffic away from Villeneuve. The farther away he can get in the shortest amount of time, the better. 

The blanket still smokes faintly from the passenger seat.

**Author's Note:**

> Not quite sure when this will be done or where it's going, but I'll try to update as often as I have time. Finals (and Stanley Cup Finals - we all know which one I care more about) are coming up, so I'll probably be wicked busy till around mid-June. Eh. 
> 
> O whale.
> 
>  
> 
> I'll be adding tags and characters as I type. 
> 
> (So...many...characters...already...I'm sorry)


End file.
